The Old Merchant Marine
by Ralph D. Paine

Chapter I. Colonial Adventurers in Little Ships

The story of American ships and sailors is an epic of blue waterwhich seems singularly remote, almost unreal, to the latergenerations. A people with a native genius for seafaring won andheld a brilliant supremacy through two centuries and then forsookthis heritage of theirs. The period of achievement was no moreextraordinary than was its swift declension. A maritime racewhose topsails flecked every ocean, whose captains courageousfrom father to son had fought with pike and cannonade to defendthe freedom of the seas, turned inland to seek a differentdestiny and took no more thought for the tall ships and richcargoes which had earned so much renown for its flag.

Vanished fleets and brave memories--a chronicle of America whichhad written its closing chapters before the Civil War! There willbe other Yankee merchantmen in times to come, but never days likethose when skippers sailed on seas uncharted in quest of portsmysterious and unknown.

The Pilgrim Fathers, driven to the northward of their intendeddestination in Virginia, landed on the shore of Cape Cod not somuch to clear the forest and till the soil as to establish afishing settlement. Like the other Englishmen who long before1620 had steered across to harvest the cod on the Grand Bank,they expected to wrest a livelihood mostly from salt water. Theconvincing argument in favor of Plymouth was that it offered agood harbor for boats and was “a place of profitable fishing."Both pious and amphibious were these pioneers whom the wildernessand the red Indian confined to the water’s edge, where they weresoon building ships to trade corn for beaver skins with theKennebec colony.

Even more energetic in taking profit from the sea were thePuritans who came to Massachusetts Bay in 1629, bringingcarpenters and shipbuilders with them to hew the pine and oak soclose at hand into keelsons, frames, and planking. Two yearslater, Governor John Winthrop launched his thirty-ton sloopBlessing of the Bay, and sent her to open “friendly commercialrelations” with the Dutch of Manhattan. Brisk though the trafficwas in furs and wampum, these mariners of Boston and Salem werenot content to voyage coastwise. Offshore fishing made skilled,adventurous seamen of them, and what they caught with hook andline, when dried and salted, was readily exchanged for othermerchandise in Bermuda, Barbados, and Europe.

A vessel was a community venture, and the custom still survivesin the ancient ports of the Maine coast where the shapely woodenschooners are fashioned. The blacksmith, the rigger, the calker,took their pay in shares. They became part owners, as didlikewise the merchant who supplied stores and material; and whenthe ship was afloat, the master, the mates, and even the seamen,were allowed cargo space for commodities which they might buy andsell to their own advantage. Thus early they learned to trade asshrewdly as they navigated, and every voyage directly concerned awhole neighborhood.

This kind of enterprise was peculiar to New England because otherresources were lacking. To the westward the French were moreinterested in exploring the rivers leading to the region of theGreat Lakes and in finding fabulous rewards in furs. The Dutch onthe Hudson were similarly engaged by means of the western trailsto the country of the Iroquois, while the planters of Virginiahad discovered an easy opulence in the tobacco crop, with slavelabor to toil for them, and they were not compelled to turn tothe hardships and the hazards of the sea. The New Englander,hampered by an unfriendly climate, hard put to it to growsufficient food, with land immensely difficult to clear, wasbetween the devil and the deep sea, and he sagaciously chose thelatter. Elsewhere in the colonies the forest was an enemy to bedestroyed with infinite pains. The New England pioneer regardedit with favor as the stuff with which to make stout ships andstep the straight masts in them.

And so it befell that the seventeenth century had not run itscourse before New England was hardily afloat on every Atlantictrade route, causing Sir Josiah Child, British merchant andeconomist, to lament in 1668 that in his opinion nothing was“more prejudicial and in prospect more dangerous to any motherkingdom than the increase of shipping in her colonies,plantations, or provinces.”

This absorbing business of building wooden vessels was scatteredin almost every bay and river of the indented coast from NovaScotia to Buzzard’s Bay and the sheltered waters of Long IslandSound. It was not restricted, as now, to well-equipped yards withcrews of trained artisans. Hard by the huddled hamlet of loghouses was the row of keel-blocks sloping to the tide. In winterweather too rough for fishing, when the little farms lay idle,this Yankee Jack-of-all-trades plied his axe and adze to shapethe timbers, and it was a routine task to peg together a sloop, aketch, or a brig, mere cockleshells, in which to fare forth toLondon, or Cadiz, or the Windward Islands--some of them not muchlarger and far less seaworthy than the lifeboat which hangs at aliner’s davits. Pinching poverty forced him to dispense with theornate, top-heavy cabins and forecastles of the foreignmerchantmen, while invention, bred of necessity, molded finerlines and less clumsy models to weather the risks of a stormycoast and channels beset with shoals and ledges. The square-rigdid well enough for deepwater voyages, but it was an awkward,lubberly contrivance for working along shore, and the colonialYankee therefore evolved the schooner with her flat fore-and-aftsails which enabled her to beat to windward and which requiredfewer men in the handling.

Dimly but unmistakably these canny seafarers in their rudebeginnings foreshadowed the creation of a merchant marine whichshould one day comprise the noblest, swiftest ships driven by thewind and the finest sailors that ever trod a deck. Even thenthese early vessels were conspicuously efficient, carryingsmaller crews than the Dutch or English, paring expenses to acloser margin, daring to go wherever commerce beckoned in orderto gain a dollar at peril of their skins.

By the end of the seventeenth century more than a thousandvessels were registered as built in the New England colonies, andSalem already displayed the peculiar talent for maritimeadventure which was to make her the most illustrious port of theNew World. The first of her line of shipping merchants was PhilipEnglish, who was sailing his own ketch Speedwell in 1676 and sorapidly advanced his fortunes that in a few years he was therichest man on the coast, with twenty-one vessels which tradedcoastwise with Virginia and offshore with Bilbao, Barbados, St.Christopher’s, and France. Very devout were his bills of lading,flavored in this manner: “Twenty hogsheads of salt, shipped bythe Grace of God in the good sloop called the Mayflower . . . .and by God’s Grace bound to Virginia or Merriland.”

No less devout were the merchants who ordered their skippers tocross to the coast of Guinea and fill the hold with negroes to besold in the West Indies before returning with sugar and molassesto Boston or Rhode Island. The slave-trade flourished from thevery birth of commerce in Puritan New England and its goldengains and exotic voyages allured high-hearted lads from farm andcounter. In 1640 the ship Desire, built at Marblehead, returnedfrom the West Indies and “brought some cotton and tobacco andnegroes, etc. from thence.” Earlier than this the Dutch ofManhattan had employed black labor, and it was provided that theIncorporated West India Company should “allot to each Patroontwelve black men and women out of the Prizes in which Negroesshould be found.”

It was in the South, however, that this kind of labor was mostneeded and, as the trade increased, Virginia and the Carolinasbecame the most lucrative markets. Newport and Bristol drove aroaring traffic in “rum and niggers,” with a hundred sail to befound in the infamous Middle Passage. The master of one of theseRhode Island slavers, writing home from Guinea in 1736, portrayedthe congestion of the trade in this wise: “For never was there somuch Rum on the Coast at one time before. Not ye like of yeFrench ships was never seen before, for ye whole coast is full ofthem. For my part I can give no guess when I shall get away, forI purchast but 27 slaves since I have been here, for slaves isvery scarce. We have had nineteen Sail of us at one time in yeRoad, so that ships that used to carry pryme slaves off is nowforced to take any that comes. Here is seven sail of us Rum menthat are ready to devour one another, for our case is desprit.”

Two hundred years of wickedness unspeakable and human torturebeyond all computation, justified by Christian men and sanctionedby governments, at length rending the nation asunder in civil warand bequeathing a problem still unsolved--all this followed inthe wake of those first voyages in search of labor which could bebought and sold as merchandise. It belonged to the dark ages withpiracy and witchcraft, better forgotten than recalled, save forits potent influence in schooling brave seamen and buildingfaster ships for peace and war.

These colonial seamen, in truth, fought for survival amid dangersso manifold as to make their hardihood astounding. It was notmerely a matter of small vessels with a few men and boys daringdistant voyages and the mischances of foundering or stranding,but of facing an incessant plague of privateers, French andSpanish, Dutch and English, or a swarm of freebooters under noflag at all. Coasts were unlighted, charts few and unreliable,and the instruments of navigation almost as crude as in the daysof Columbus. Even the savage Indian, not content with lurking inambush, went afloat to wreak mischief, and the records of theFirst Church of Salem contain this quaint entry under date ofJuly 25, 1677: “The Lord having given a Commission to the Indiansto take no less than 13 of the Fishing Ketches of Salem andCaptivate the men . . . it struck a great consternation into allthe people here. The Pastor moved on the Lord’s Day, and thewhole people readily consented, to keep the Lecture Day followingas a Fast Day, which was accordingly done . . . . The Lord waspleased to send in some of the Ketches on the Fast Day which waslooked on as a gracious smile of Providence. Also there had been19 wounded men sent into Salem a little while before; also aKetch sent out from Salem as a man-of-war to recover the rest ofthe Ketches. The Lord give them Good Success.”

To encounter a pirate craft was an episode almost commonplace andoften more sordid than picturesque. Many of these sea rogues werethieves with small stomach for cutlasses and slaughter. They wereof the sort that overtook Captain John Shattuck sailing home fromJamaica in 1718 when he reported his capture by one CaptainCharles Vain, “a Pyrat” of 12 guns and 120 men who took him toCrooked Island, plundered him of various articles, stripped thebrig, abused the crew, and finally let him go. In the same yearthe seamen of the Hopewell related that near Hispaniola they metwith pirates who robbed and ill-treated them and carried offtheir mate because they had no navigator.

Ned Low, a gentleman rover of considerable notoriety, stooped tofilch the stores and gear from a fleet of fourteen poor fishermenof Cape Sable. He had a sense of dramatic values, however, andfrequently brandished his pistols on deck, besides which, as setdown by one of his prisoners, “he had a young child in Boston forwhom he entertained such tenderness that on every lucid intervalfrom drinking and revelling, I have seen him sit down and weepplentifully.”

A more satisfying figure was Thomas Pounds, who was taken by thesloop Mary, sent after him from Boston in 1689. He was discoveredin Vineyard Sound, and the two vessels fought a gallant action,the pirate flying a red flag and refusing to strike. CaptainSamuel Pease of the Mary was mortally wounded, while Pounds, thisproper pirate, strode his quarter-deck and waved his naked sword,crying, “Come on board, ye dogs, and I will strike YOUpresently.” This invitation was promptly accepted by the stoutseamen from Boston, who thereupon swarmed over the bulwark anddrove all hands below, preserving Thomas Pounds to be hanged inpublic.

In 1703 John Quelch, a man of resource, hoisted what he called“Old Roger” over the Charles--a brigantine which had beenequipped as a privateer to cruise against the French of Acadia.This curious flag of his was described as displaying a skeletonwith an hour-glass in one hand and “a dart in the heart withthree drops of blood proceeding from it in the other.” Quelch leda mutiny, tossed the skipper overboard, and sailed for Brazil,capturing several merchantmen on the way and looting them of rum,silks, sugar, gold dust, and munitions. Rashly he came sailingback to Marblehead, primed with a plausible yarn, but his mentalked too much when drunk and all hands were jailed. Upon thegallows Quelch behaved exceedingly well, “pulling off his hat andbowing to the spectators,” while the somber Puritan merchants inthe crowd were, many of them, quietly dealing in the merchandisefetched home by pirates who were lucky enough to steer clear ofthe law.

This was a shady industry in which New York took the more activepart, sending out supplies to the horde of pirates who ravagedthe waters of the Far East and made their haven at Madagascar,and disposing of the booty received in exchange. GovernorFletcher had dirtied his hands by protecting this commerce and,as a result, Lord Bellomont was named to succeed him. SaidWilliam III, “I send you, my Lord, to New York, because an honestand intrepid man is wanted to put these abuses down, and becauseI believe you to be such a man.”

Such were the circumstances in which Captain William Kidd,respectable master mariner in the merchant service, was employedby Lord Bellomont, royal Governor of New York, New Hampshire, andMassachusetts, to command an armed ship and harry the pirates ofthe West Indies and Madagascar. Strangest of all the sea tales ofcolonial history is that of Captain Kidd and his cruise in theAdventure-Galley. His name is reddened with crimes nevercommitted, his grisly phantom has stalked through the legendsand literature of piracy, and the Kidd tradition still has magicto set treasure-seekers exploring almost every beach, cove, andheadland from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. Yet if truth weretold, he never cut a throat or made a victim walk the plank. Hewas tried and hanged for the trivial offense of breaking the headof a mutinous gunner of his own crew with a wooden bucket. It waseven a matter of grave legal doubt whether he had committed onesingle piratical act. His trial in London was a farce. In thecase of the captured ships he alleged that they were sailingunder French passes, and he protested that his privateeringcommission justified him, and this contention was not disproven.The suspicion is not wanting that he was condemned as a scapegoatbecause certain noblemen of England had subscribed the capital tooutfit his cruise, expecting to win rich dividends in goldcaptured from the pirates he was sent to attack. Against thesemen a political outcry was raised, and as a result Captain Kiddwas sacrificed. He was a seaman who had earned honorabledistinction in earlier years, and fate has played his memory ashabby trick.

It was otherwise with Blackbeard, most flamboyant of all colonialpirates, who filled the stage with swaggering success, chewingwine-glasses in his cabin, burning sulphur to make his ship seemmore like hell, and industriously scourging the whole Atlanticcoast. Charleston lived in terror of him until LieutenantMaynard, in a small sloop, laid him alongside in ahammer-and-tongs engagement and cut off the head of Blackbeard todangle from the bowsprit as a trophy.

Of this rudely adventurous era, it would be hard to find a seamanmore typical than the redoubtable Sir William Phips who becamethe first royal Governor of the Massachusetts Colony in 1692.Born on a frontier farm of the Maine coast while many of thePilgrim fathers were living, “his faithful mother,” wrote CottonMather, “had no less than twenty-six children, whereof twenty-onewere sons; but equivalent to them all was William, one of theyoungest, whom, his father dying, was left young with his mother,and with her he lived, keeping ye sheep in Ye Wilderness until hewas eighteen years old.” Then he apprenticed himself to aneighboring shipwright who was building sloops and pinnaces and,having learned the trade, set out for Boston. As a ship-carpenterhe plied his trade, spent his wages in the taverns of thewaterside and there picked up wondrous yarns of the silver-ladengalleons of Spain which had shivered their timbers on the reefsof the Bahama Passage or gone down in the hurricanes that besetthose southerly seas. Meantime he had married a wealthy widowwhose property enabled him to go treasure-hunting on the Spanishmain. From his first voyage thither in a small vessel he escapedwith his life and barely enough treasure to pay the cost of theexpedition.

In no wise daunted he laid his plans to search for a richlyladened galleon which was said to have been wrecked half acentury before off the coast of Hispaniola. Since his own fundswere not sufficient for this exploit, he betook himself toEngland to enlist the aid of the Government. With bulldogpersistence he besieged the court of James II for a whole year,this rough-and-ready New England shipmaster, until he was given aroyal frigate for his purpose. He failed to fish up more silverfrom the sands but, nothing daunted, he persuaded other patronsto outfit him with a small merchantman, the James and Mary, inwhich he sailed for the coast of Hispaniola. This time he foundhis galleon and thirty-two tons of silver. “Besides thatincredible treasure of plate, thus fetched up from seven or eightfathoms under water, there were vast riches of Gold, and Pearls,and Jewels . . . . All that a Spanish frigot was to be enrichedwithal.”

Up the Thames sailed the lucky little merchantman in the year of1687, with three hundred thousand pounds sterling as herfreightage of treasure. Captain Phips made honest division withhis backers and, because men of his integrity were not overplentiful in England after the Restoration, King James knightedhim. He sailed home to Boston, “a man of strong and sturdyframe,” as Hawthorne fancied him, “whose face had been roughenedby northern tempests and blackened by the burning sun of the WestIndies . . . . He wears an immense periwig flowing down over hisshoulders . . . . His red, rough hands which have done many agood day’s work with the hammer and adze are half-covered by thedelicate lace rues at the wrist.” But he carried with him themanners of the forecastle, a man hasty and unlettered butsuperbly brave and honest. Even after he had become Governor hethrashed the captain of the Nonesuch frigate of the royal navy,and used his fists on the Collector of the Port after cursing himwith tremendous gusto. Such behavior in a Governor was toostrenuous, and Sir William Phips was summoned to England, wherehe died while waiting his restoration to office and royal favor.Failing both, he dreamed of still another treasure voyage, “forit was his purpose, upon his dismission from his Government oncemore to have gone upon his old Fishing-Trade, upon a mighty shelfof rock and banks of sand that lie where he had informedhimself.”

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Old Merchant Marine
By Ralph D. Paine
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